Highlights from the SEW Blog: Mar. 13, 2006

Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary search headlines from around the web. If you’re not familiar with our blog, click on any of the links below, or visit the blog’s home page at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/.

Brazil Asks Google To Help Orkut To Stop Organizing Organized Crime

Poor old Orkut, Google’s social networking service. First it’s knocked for only being popular in Brazil. Then it’s knocked for being a haven Al-Qaeda sympathizers. Now it’s back to Brazil, where “Google Brasil summoned on chat room complaint” from Reuters covers how the Brazilian public ministry is asking Google to explain what it is doing to curb organized crime activities allegedly being committed or planned within Orkut. The story notes that 73 percent of Orkut’s users are apparently Brazilian. The story makes mention of child pornography in Orkut. The service has also been dinged for drug sales, with ten arrests made in Brazil last July.

Will Local Search Engines Replace National Search Engines for Local Search?

ClickZ reports“about half the panelists believe local search engines will replace national search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN when it comes to specific market needs,” according to Borrell Associates’s “2006 Local Search Advertising” report.

Two-thirds of the panelists say that this can happen as soon as five-years from now. My own personal feeling is that this won’t happen. Yahoo, Google and the other engines, in my opinion, are doing a wonderful job with their local search portals, and the vertical integration with their main search portals. In addition, Google and MSN have wonderful search advertising targeting, with Yahoo not lagging that far behind. But with local search revenue to hit $987 million this year and double the year after, there is plenty of money to be shared amongst all the engines.

Google has rarely spoken publicly about click fraud issues surrounding their Google AdWords program, even with the publicity it has received of late and today’s $90 million class action settlement. So an Inside AdWords blog entry detailing many of the frequently asked questions advertisers have about click fraud and invalid clicks was a surprise, as was the Google Blog entryabout the specific settlement details.

Yahoo’s Yang Says It’s More Important To Be In China Than Risk Of Not Participating

News.com reports that Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang said, “It is more important for us to participate, not only for economic reasons, but to be able to help shape where the industry is going.” Yang said that Yahoo has to balance the “risk of not participating” and overall, “we are seeing changes, on the whole, for the positive” in the Chinese market. Yang seems to take a different angle with his reasoning for operating in China, when compared to Barry Diller’s Keynote where he commented that being in China is about being about to “stomach operating in a country” and that operating in China is more of a political decision then a business decision. Yang replied to giving up details of a Chinese dissident saying; “We feel horrible about that…We have no way of preventing that beforehand….If you want to do business there you have to comply.” So can Yahoo stomach it? Can Yahoo influencethe political gates?

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.